A Bibliometric Narrative Review on Modern Navigation Aids for People with Visual Impairment

Abstract

The innovations in the field of specialized navigation systems have become prominent research topics. As an applied science for people with special needs, navigation aids for the visually impaired are a key sociotechnique that helps users to independently navigate and access needed resources indoors and outdoors. This paper adopts the informetric analysis method to assess the current research and explore trends in navigation systems for the visually impaired based on bibliographic records retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). A total of 528 relevant publications from 2010 to 2020 were analyzed. This work answers the following questions: What are the publication characteristics and most influential publication sources? Who are the most active and influential authors? What are their research interests and primary contributions to society? What are the featured key studies in the field? What are the most popular topics and research trends, described by keywords? Additionally, we closely investigate renowned works that use different multisensor fusion methods, which are believed to be the bases of upcoming research. The key findings of this work aim to help upcoming researchers quickly move into the field, as they can easily grasp the frontiers and the trend of R&D in the research area. Moreover, we suggest the researchers embrace smartphone-based agile development, as well as pay more attention to phone-based prominent frameworks such as ARCore or ARKit, to achieve a fast prototyping for their proposed systems. This study also provides references for the associated fellows by highlighting the critical junctures of the modern assistive travel aids for people with visual impairments.